Anarchism is a social movement that seeks liberation from oppressive systems of control including but not limited to the state, capitalism, racism, sexism, speciesism, and religion. Anarchists advocate a self-managed, classless, stateless society without borders, bosses, or rulers where everyone takes collective responsibility for the health and prosperity of themselves and the environment.

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My main concerns with the anarchist (and socialist in general) movement are interrelated and I think they are things we are collectively failing so spectacularly in that the reproduction of our support is in itself a testament to the massive power the material conditions have over the radicalisation of an individual.

1.organization and communication.

Creating an association between like-minded people and then spending the rest of our lives reaffirming each other's point of view, shit-flinging with AnCaps and protesting once in a while simply doesn't cut it.

In my opinion what we should be doing is instead organise is horizontal (obviously) structures with the explicit intent of radicalising as many people as is humanly possible.

A) Find the most literary people in each organisation and have them in specific communicate with the media if there ever arises the need. Any publicity is better than no publicity and good publicity is better than bad.

C) There should be a much better coordination between different anarchist and socialist forums, blogs, youtubers and any and all other venues of information. They should all link to and cite the others. That's how you show that it's not just one guy lost in the middle of the internet that believes in something extreme. That's how you show this is actually a valid alternative. That's exactly what the austrians did. They coordinated and now they have a following despite being a practically defunct ideology.

D) Our view should not be presented as an opinion or as fringe by us. It should be presented as a moderate and self-evident approach to a simple problem. By this I mean that we should show the people that our radicalism is not a form of extremism. That what we're saying is down to earth so to speak. We should contest the dominant ideology directly to grow. Again, that's how the austrians managed to get a following despite being a ridiculous ideology. They presented simple solutions as self-evident.

E) Enough with the elitism. let's save this for us. In any public setting we should be trying to radicalise people, not to argue about what is the best conception of our beliefs. As an example to this, I have radicalised more of my coworkers in a year by linking them to R.Wolff's talk in the brecht forum than I have in the entirety of my life prior to that. This is not the time or place to criticise co-ops. People don't give two shits about expanded reproduction. They don't even understand what it means and they are not interested in learning what it means. They will just shut down and stop paying attention when you are trying to argue with them the details. The thing is this. People don't see the full spectrum of possibilities. They only see a few options within capitalism and they don't even conceive of the capital/labor division. In order to radicalise them you must show it to them and then you must persuade them to take a leap of faith from their entire world of accepting it to a new one of rejecting it. This is not the time to argue about gift-economies or about abstractions or about the law of value and its relation to the market. This is the time to persuade them to leave behind their framework for a new one and they will only do that if you don't scare them away by attacking everything they take for granted. You may think this is little but it's not. You persuade that person to view the world through the categories of labor, capital and surplus wealth and he leaves capitalism behind. If you have him reject the fundamental contradiction of capitalism he may for the moment stay a market socialist or something similarly bourgeois, but from that point onward he is no longer hostile to the internal debate and will radicalise himself further. The thing is to give him something to hang on to to make the transition.

D) Speaking of agitation, it wouldn't hurt if we had organised groups with their explicit purpose being disseminating our views in other sites when subjects relevant to our worldview are concerned. That's essentially what stormfront did and managed to pretty much turn the european side of the internet reactionary. How nice would it be if instead of those imbeciles spouting their hatred we had a few people showing how the reserve army of labor is the mechanism that pits native wage laborers against immigrants. Showing a solution to the immigration problem that disconnects the problem from the immigrants and reconnects it with capitalism. But we didn't and that wasn't the narrative that dominated politics. Again, this is something I have real life experience with. I had acquaintances flirting with racism that were turned around when they got a simple tool to process their misery through. How difficult do you think it is to turn a miserable person into a "race-realist" if that's the framework you provide him with?

E) It would be ideal if we could reclaim our presence in the workplace, but I don't see that as being easy. At the very least I think anarchists should be less interested in protesting in their own blocks (which will be presented as a bunch of hoodlums anyway) and instead enter the mainstream progressive demostrations to spread our analysis and our solution. Again basic stuff.

F) I'm not morally opposed to throwing molotovs at banks, but it won't bring the banking sector down, it won't bring capitalism or its state down and it won't radicalise anyone. It only scares mainstream people (the ones we are trying to radicalise) away and sinks us deeper into irrelevance. we should be communicating ideas and criticising the material conditions that emiserate us in a grounded way, not marginalising ourselves. At the very least our position should be clearly distinguished from those elements for the good of the movement.

2.Reclaiming the terminology.

People don't understand what we are talking about. It's as simple as that. You tell them you are an anarchist and they think you are an ancap. You tell them you are a communist and they think you are a state-capitalist. This is obviously a problem.

We should be spending 24/7 explaining our terminology and showing how we are not extremists. People don't know what "the socialisation of the means of production" is. We should tell them how we are simply for the democratisation of the public and financial sphere. Nothing more. That is our goal if we don't get into semantics. We want people to have more control over their lives, over their society, over their jobs and over themselves. Not very extremist. We should flat out ignore the ancaps and instead ridicule them for wanting something actually extremist that people can easilly reject istead of crediting them as presenting a rational alternative.

3.Reclaiming history

We are the movement that can actually say "yes our philosophy was put into action 2 - 3 times and it didn't fall apart or lead to some horror, instead people raised production in the middle of a war and even intellectuals like Orwell supported and fought for it". This along with the viability and sustainability of worker ownership and management should be repeated ad nauseum to show how it is a plan that can work. A plan that did work and a plan that is currently working even in a capitalist setting that opposes its very principles. We have empiricism with us and we should make use of it. People can reject lofty arguments and your morality and your rational constructs but empirical data holds significant power. Why the hell are we not making use of it.

In short, my relatively unpopular opinion is that the currently existing anarchist movement is flat out incompetent.

Phewwww. That was ok I guess.

Edit Also whenever someone mentions the classroom example or some of those free-rider examples we seriously need to be saying that we absolutely agree but the functional classroom is socialist, not capitalist.

I'm still yet to see any evidence of anarchists damaging "small mom and pop stores" - isn't that just a bullshit media narrative? Virtually every instance of property destruction that I've seen or read about has had a very justifiable target.

Without them, it would be a direct fight between everyone and a small elite, and we would win.

Do you seriously think that Indian immigrant down the street from me who runs that convenience store is the lynchpin of global capitalism? We're talking about a guy who makes ends meet by selling Top for fucks sake. He's far from economically advantaged or in real control of anything.

Yeah, but liberals need to stop pretending like mom and pop stores are any less exploitative than say Wal Mart, it just isn't true. The only benefit of mom and pops stores is that they may be easier for workers to create change.

I've worked in a few. They're usually pretty accommodating people. They aren't hurting anybody, just trying to get by like the rest of us. Not only that, most of them are entirely family run anyway. So it's not like they're actually hiring anybody (or at least not a lot of people). Smashing up your local bodega is just shitty.

Independent businesses are a good thing. It means people in a community have greater control over their economic prospects as opposed to...well, wall mart.

If you think local, indepdendent businesses are somehow equally (or more) exploitative than Wal-Mart or any other major corporation, you're not paying attention. Yes, capitalist structures are inherently exploitative, regardless of scale, and workers should control their livelihoods. But that exploitativeness becomes exponentially larger as the company grows. Small local businesses are low on the capitalist hierarchy, and as such, they are victims of that structure, same as us. They aren't the bourgeoisie we're fighting against, they're our (potential) allies, as far as I'm concerned.

I don't understand how they can be allies, I am not ruling it out because I wouldn't like them to be, but we advocate something opposed to their how they make a living. Business-owners, whether small and local, or large and multinational, want to continue to have dominion over what they "own".

There's a lot of diversity in smaller shops. I've worked for a number of owner/operator outfits, and while there are definitely those that use their relatively small size to fly under the labor dept radar, there have been a couple that were very conscious of the relationship with their workers and tried to foster a communal environment with some fairly reasonable profit sharing.

Yeah, looking back at it, the flip side of the two good shops I worked for are the dozen that were terrible on their best days and the current one that is merely not going out of their way to exploit their employees.

It also doesn't hurt that I'm in the trades, so threatening to walk off a job has some weight even if it's not a union shop.

I'll give you mom and pop stores but smashing up banks can only make people more likely to use credit unions, as long as we're not smashing up those right? Cause I mean people want to avoid violence near institutions, so smashing up banks = drive people away from banks. Also it increases operating costs, but banks are insured, so it would mean more money to insurance companies hrmmmm....

Agreed. Violence should be a last resort. I get the impression a lot of people who quickly advocate for violence haven't really seen what brutal random violence is like. It's easy to think "I'll just make sure everyone I care about is safe. It won't happen to me!" It's the action movie hero version of things vs. cold hard random reality of conflict and violence. I became much more of a pacifist when an old friend of mine lost her mom in the Clackamas Town Center shooting. Advocating war means the deaths of not only soldiers, who could otherwise be friends, but many civilians, as well. Plus, the impact upon their families and friends should not be forgotten. War means accepting the deaths and maiming of thousands of innocent people. Claiming that one doesn't want to hurt civilians is no excuse when it is known beyond a shadow of a doubt that innocent people will die as a result.

Tell that person to read some Spinoza, who had some good ideas. "Right is co-extensive with power" means that you have the power to speak, so you have the right to free speech. Nothing liberal about that.

The liberal idea is not simply rights. It's the idea that people have to form vertical organization in order to have rights, which might be true about so-called "private property rights", but that is only because private property is a fictitious construct the acknowledgment of which creates real differences in power. In other words, vertical organization is built into the definition.

Ancaps are so irrelevant that making fun of them gives them attention they don't deserve.

I think ancaps should be excluded from discourse on the left not because they are irrelevant, but because they are legitimately dangerous and should not be empowered through discourse.

Ancaps have a big advantage over the left as it exists today, namely, they are not afraid of power. They have the Koch brothers, they have an ideology that overlaps quite a bit with the American founding mythos, and they have followed the neoliberal ideological position to its furthest conclusion.

They have institutional frameworks set up that captured America's attention during the financial crisis. Ron Paul won tons of votes during the Republican primary. It is pretty clear that they occupy the space the left once did in American politics. The ancaps and Austrian libertarians have destroyed the left as the answer to the crisis of capitalism, and the left should stop pretending otherwise or else risk further degeneracy into irrelevance.

While I still consider the NAP to be a superior moral system to most, I no longer consider myself to be an Anarcho Capitalist. The Koch brothers probably wouldn't last long in that kind of world, anyway, what with the NAP being totally adverse to pollution.

Being an Anarchist does not mean living in abject poverty and flogging yourself with a copy of Das Capital. Stop wasting your potential being a dropout squater.

Being a radical feminist does not mean being Sex Negative. Nor does it mean using Sex Positivism or Polyamory as an excuse for creepy behavior.

Obesity (BMI > 30) is unnatural and unhealthy, and we shouldn't normalize it just because it's common within wealthy nations. That said, body shaming is still fucked up.

Y'all should be using Free/Open Source Software, encrypting everything, learning to program (and/or solder) and getting involved at your local hackerspace. By not getting involved you are depriving yourself of useful tools and allowing Patriarchal Capitalists to control the narrative of technology.

Y'all should be using Free/Open Source Software, encrypting everything, learning to program and getting involved at your local hackerspace. By not getting involved you are depriving yourself of useful tools and allowing Patriarchal Capitalists to control the narrative of technology.

You are correct one does not imply the other. It's just that I've meet many polyamorous people who did not respect personal space or objectified others. That is what I find creeperish, not the Polyamory itself.

OK. The way you phrased it made it sounded like you were calling polyamory creepy. It would've been clearer if you said "nor does it mean using polyamory as an excuse to be a creepr", or something like that.

Animal Rights activists have way too much sway within Anarchism. Let's focus on liberating the humans first.

There is a dangerous fallacy lurking in the shadows of such a "Let's do X first" argument. It is for instance very visible within the feminism movement and the left.

As an example, we now have a pretty radical feminist party surging forward here in Sweden. They have ~3-4% support on a national scale now, up from virtually nothing, which is pretty huge seeing as how national politics is a rather rigid affair nowadays. They will make it into the parliment if this trend continues. Their May Day rallies were among the biggest in the country this year. And it is hard to see this as anything else than the left/socialists failures to properly incorporate feminism within their ideological base, because they have been busy liberating the workers.

This is then especially relevant for the case of animal rights, because the question at hand is pretty simple.

Are animals being exploited today? By virtually any definition - yes!

Do we need to exploit them for survival, or even for a comfortable everyday life? - no.

What straightforward type of "direct action" is required? - Just step out of the exploitative apparatus. Unlike state-capitalist society, it is pretty easy in regards to animal exploitation.

This basic assertion is so simple that it should not detract much energy from other, admittedly more complex, areas of anarchist thought and struggle. It is as always a matter of putting your energy where it counts the most, which is also why I definitely agree with

Anarchist vegans who argue against eating honey make us look like a bunch of hipsters (and I'm a vegetarian).

because it is simply irrelevant considering the current state of affairs.

So while it would be asking too much (and really not needed) to expect all anarchists to constantly promote animal rights ideas, the least we could ask for I think is a general acceptance of them as being at the very core of anarchist thought and be encouraging towards comrades that actively pursue this venue as part of their personal platform.

I mean, once the friction of the transition is dealt with, the vegan part in being an anarchist takes up virtually zero time and effort in my life, and leaves ample time for "liberating the humans".

I disagree with all of these except perhaps the last one and the one about logistical failures. A lot of "19th century rhetoric" is still relevant today - the grievances of working people are still pretty much the same, because capitalist institutions still operate in pretty much the same way.

There's a significant learning curve to the 19th century lingo. The reason why Russel Brand's interview was so popular was because he rephrased 19th century rhetoric into everyday language that people could grok. We need to modernize our rhetoric.

90% of the people I recruited at my university for a socialist club were interested based on a simple example of Marxist economics. Nobody is going to take you seriously if you have no theory and just want to smash everything.

and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize that. My problem with anti-civ is that it gives an overly simplistic critique of modern civilization, instead of focusing on the actual problems which can be addressed. Again, Anarchists gravitate towards abstract theories instead of focusing on logistics.

I remember someone linking to a post-civ thing and all the primitivists calling them reformists and liberals for not believing all technology to be evil even when they were still anti-civ. Awful website.

Black blocs and G8 summit/RNC/DNC blockades have become predictable and ceremonialized, and thus usually pointless.

Radical veganism is deeply privileged and in some contexts unsustainable.

Voting on local issues can be positive, and while national politics is all the same old shit, reformism can't save us, et cetera, refusing to vote on anything doesn't accomplish shit as a statement whereas something like the $15 minimum wage proposed in Seattle would at least make things somewhat better.

yeah at first I felt like the first few were incredible and the rest were mediocre but after a while the rest kinda grew on me. idk whether you know of them or will like them or not, but the guy also did some mostly solo stuff before as Johnny Hobo and the Freight Trains and then after as Ramshackle Glory

Johnny hobo has a really raw sound that I personally like, but he uses an electronic drum set dub that takes away from it a bit.

Ramshackle glory is a lot more developed, and you could say it's more "mature" (whether that's a good thing or not is subjective) but I enjoy it.

I loved the first two tracks, the alley cat one, and My Idea of Fun. The rest felt indistinct, melodically and lyrically, and while he'd sometimes drop some really witty and/or heavy shit a lot of the lyrics were just slogans and sort of anecdotes about the punk scene that I didn't find relatable or compelling.

Both those Ramshackle Glory songs were damn great, though. Will have to check that album out.

Black blocs and G8 summit/RNC/DNC blockades have become predictable and ceremonialized, and thus usually pointless.

Didn't the security forces at past G8/RNC/DNC allowed protesters to break through the first security line just so they feel like they've accomplished something? I feel that mobilizations have lost focus of the original goal and settled with fighting against the security forces.

Radical veganism is deeply privileged and in some contexts unsustainable.

Non-radical vegetarianism is a lot easier imho. Radical veganism tends to takes things to the extreme. Hell, even eating less meat and cheese has its benefits.

Wingnut Dishwashers Union are overrated.

Still waiting for labor organizers to turn their attention to the tech sector. Tons of overworked and unfairly paid people there who are basically supporting the modern economy.

Still waiting for labor organizers to turn their attention to the tech sector.

Then stop waiting and start doing. Join the IWW or campaign in your workplace for a union. Make or join your employee advisory group.

I work at a fast food joint where I currently represent my co-workers who have issues with management that they feel they can't confront ( Mostly TFW's, but it's open). I'm not currently recognized as "legitimate" by management or corporate, and we don't have enough support for a full blown union(TFW's are scared, and I don't blame them)-But I get shit done. I keep an accordion folder at home for everyone, I help monitor "cases", I make reports on their behalf if they ask. Our most recent success is the addition of another worker who wants to help on the administrative side, and getting the boss to pay overtime to a certain worker after we bitched to the labour board repeatedly.

Now if a minimum wage making coffee slinger like myself can manage that, what's the excuse for the tech industry?Nobody is going to give you permission to do that-You just gotta toughen the fuck up and go for it with force.

I'm actually quite lucky to have a non-exploitive job in tech. I think the biggest thing holding back unionization of tech is the mainstream perception of unions and tech workers thinking they have a chance of getting rich. As tech workers share more stories of burnout and harassment they are slowly beginning to realize the founders are exploiting them.

There's a lot of people with shit jobs, I'm glad you don't have to go through that.

My SO works in tech as well, and has gone through tech burn-out. There has to be agitation. Tech workers have to realize the money isn't worth the overtime and exploration and mental anguish and abuse they face. Like many industries, we need to agitate and complain and get them going.

Non-radical vegetarianism is a lot easier imho. Radical veganism tends to takes things to the extreme. Hell, even eating less meat and cheese has its benefits.

Vegetarianism/veganism can be admirable but I think the focus should be on fighting industrial farming of both animals and plants. Monocrop, petroleum-based soy farming is way more destructive to animals than somebody killing and eating a chicken they raised in their backyard.

I'm a little skeptical about the harm of soy farming, since the Chinese have been making tofu since 100 BC. Although I don't doubt big agro business's ability to sacrifice safety/health for increased profits.

There's nothing wrong with firearms, and more people on the Left should own and practice with them.

Voting for the lesser of two evil candidates is not hypocritical, it's just logical, as long as it doesn't cut into your activism time.

Not all socialists are monsters. The Soviet Union was a bad influence on them, but now that it's gone, we should be willing to (carefully) give them a second chance.

Ancaps/libertarians are bigger threat than most of us are willing to acknowledge. Even if they're small now, they have the kind of rhetoric that resonates with people, and if we let them they will hijack the word "anarchism" until nobody will even remember that we exist.

Dumpster-diving, when you can afford to buy food, just means taking the free stuff away from actual poor people who need it.

Our obsession with political correctness does not actually stop racism/sexism/etc., it only creates an environment where people are afraid to disagree with each other.

Occupy was not a failure. It gave the Left legitimacy, and it gave people something to rally around, so that they could say "I'm with OWS" instead of struggling to explain anarcho-syndicalist philosophy every time anyone asked about their politics.

Revolution is not going to be fun and we should drop this bullshit about peace and love. Revolutions, even nonviolent ones, are dangerous and traumatic. If we're not prepared for that, we'll get our asses kicked.

Smoking weed is bad for you. Yes, of course you should be allowed to do it, and the Drug War is fucking insane. But that doesn't make lighting something on fire and sucking smoke into your lungs any healthier.

A lot of self-described radicals don't really care about changing the world, they just want to feel like badass freedom fighters so they can have some cool stories to tell their friends.

Crimethinc is just a club for affluent college kids who want to wander aimlessly around the countryside feeling special.

If someone has such PTSD that the mere mention of bigotry can cause a panic attack, that person has a severe emotional disorder and needs therapy immediately. Thinking that we can solve this by covering the world in "trigger warnings" is delusional and counterproductive.

It's important to be informed about national politics, because this stuff affects you even if you don't believe in the state.

Chris Hedges is a smart guy who has a lot to offer, even if we don't agree with him about black blocs.

Edit because I forgot:

Science is good. Technology is good. Modern medicine is good (I happen to owe it my life). Any society that can't advance scientifically will never last.

Crimethinc is just a club for affluent college kids who want to wander aimlessly around the countryside feeling special.

It seems every time crimethinc gets criticized, they end up being portrayed as wealthier and more elite. Like, yeah, they're ridiculous and clearly unaware of their privilege, but all their writings indicate that they mostly have not gone to college and that they don't necessarily come from exceptionally wealthy families, just not especially poor ones.

If someone has such PTSD that the mere mention of bigotry can cause a Panic Attack[2] , that person has a severe emotional disorder and needs therapy immediately. Thinking that we can solve this by covering the world in "trigger warnings" is delusional and counterproductive.

Therapy does not work immediately. Do these individuals need to avoid the internet entirely until they have time to work through their issues?

Yeah, I once had had an "anarchist" on this forum tell me that reeducation camps were a good idea as long as they were for "reactionaries." This seems like a great community, for the most part, but I'd grab my bug-out bag and head for the hills if some of my comrades ever actually took over the world.

Voting for the lesser of two evil candidates is not hypocritical, it's just logical, as long as it doesn't cut into your activism time.

There's an argument for voting for the eviler candidate. People are more likely to organize and reject politics when you have awful politicians (ex: Bush).

Smoking weed is bad for you. Yes, of course you should be allowed to do it, and the Drug War is fucking insane. But that doesn't make lighting something on fire and sucking smoke into your lungs any healthier.

This. Comrades forget propaganda is an art form and it's purpose is to win people over to our side. Fucking drop the "Anarchism doesn't need to be popular" bullshit. Anarchism isn't some elitist political theory club. Revolutions need people, lots of people.

Crimethinc is just a club for affluent college kids who want to wander aimlessly around the countryside feeling special.

Their Rolling Thunder magazine actually did a good job of breaking down some complex subjects like building a culture of resistance. I'm not sure when or why CrimeThinc turned into DrifterThinc.

If someone has such PTSD that the mere mention of bigotry can cause a panic attack, that person has a severe emotional disorder and needs therapy immediately. Thinking that we can solve this by covering the world in "trigger warnings" is delusional and counterproductive.

The real problem is the lack of mental health services for victims. Trigger Warnings are a stop gap measure at best. However, PTSD will continue to get worse if untreated. The right to mental health care should be a universal right.

There's nothing wrong with firearms, and more people on the Left should own and practice with them

I would say this is fairly popular, although it is true that some anarchists support guns reluctantly.

Science is good. Technology is good. Modern medicine is good (I happen to owe it my life). Any society that can't advance scientifically will never last.

What do you mean here? Can't advance, or just doesn't advance? How long does a society have to last to "last"? Many human societies around the world have remained very much the same for thousands of years.

Occupy was not a failure. It gave the Left legitimacy, and it gave people something to rally around, so that they could say "I'm with OWS" instead of struggling to explain anarcho-syndicalist philosophy every time anyone asked about their politics.

I always thought that the success of OWS was putting class back on the discussion table

There are a lot of good works re: the 60s counterculture as a mass resurgence of radical socialism in the US. I also take this issue personally because my father was involved in the leftist student movement and the psychedelic subculture at the time.

Organic food is a bourgeois luxury, belief in its benefits borders on mysticism/superstition, and its a waste of arable land

Get guns and learn to use them

Individualist/Lifestyle anarchists eating out of dumpsters and so on are more or less parasites of first world excess and ironically exemplify a lot of privileges of living there

It really wouldn't hurt for more anarchists to get STEM degrees and fill the ranks of fields that really matter in today's technological society.

For that matter, it really wouldn't hurt for more anarchists to get blue collar jobs and, again, be in the places that matter when a strike is going to happen

What I'm getting at is: Basket-weaving is great for self-actualization, and being a starving artist is really romantic and cool, but living on the outside/fringe of society doesn't really situate you well to change it. When it's time to seize the means of production, it helps to have more than a pottery wheel at hand.

Not really an opinion, but I get a kind of cognitive dissonance about transgenderism and recognizing gender as a social construct. I don't have any problem with transgender persons or anything, I'm just not sure how to resolve the idea that people should be free to choose their gender and the idea that gender is in many ways an arbitrary construct anyway.

Organic food is a bourgeois luxury, belief in its benefits borders on mysticism/superstition, and its a waste of arable land

Agreed with everything except this. The Organic movement was in response to heavy use of unregulated pesticides in the 50s-80s; which we believe were responsible for cancer clusters in Californian farm workers. Also DDT almost killed off the Bald Eagle. Mono-culture factory farming has been proven to strip nutrients from the soil. Not all agricultural advances in the name of profit are great. Just sayin'

You are correct in calling out today's Organic food as being a luxury item.

I certainly get why the organic movement sprung up, that is in response to legitimate problems, but I think their solution is just as bad if not worse.

Not all agricultural advances in the name of profit are great.

Well, its the "in the name of profit" part that's the key, because incentives aren't really in line with making people healthy and treating workers well. Many of the advances could be much better utilized if managed by the people who would bear the consequences of mismanagement.

I don't believe Total Anarchist Victory will ever happen, but I still want us to do everything we can in spite of that and not just numbly watch the world slide into a fully dystopian wasteland. We need to give up on "saving the world", but still fight like there might be a tomorrow worth living.

I often think about how unlikely anarchism being implemented in the world actually is, given how chaotic and complex everything is. Still, it's worth striving for, I think. If only because it creates structures that in the inevitable collapse of society will be able to pick up the slack.

I don't think I'll ever live in a perfect world, but if anarchists can do anything it's give people more control over their lives then they would have otherwise. Which I'm okay with, really.

It depends on what "total anarchist victory" is. If it is occupying an arbitrary territorial area on a map, then we might not ever achieve that. If it means eliminating all states on Earth, then we might not achieve that either.

But this idea of a state as a territorial entity is itself a form of domination. For example, there are many nomadic anarchist traveling kids who share a similar culture, yet you won't find them on a map. That is because anarchism defies the spatial grid of intelligibility that is enforced on us through state cartography.

Is having a blob on a map success? I don't know, this is a question anarchists should ask themselves.

The archetypal "total anarchist/communist victory" would be most of the planet living in pure communism.

That is extremely unrealistic, but I think it's still somewhat possible.

The most realistic thing we can hope for is the destruction of capitalism, and anarchism/pure communism being a major contender in what comes after. Who cares, the first priority is destruction of capitalism and the state, so w/e.

I think religious anarchists should abandon religious anarchism for secular anarchism, but with the caveat that I think revolutionary religion can be a thing and that secular anarchist orgs and affinity groups should reject or accept a religious anarchist based on shared tactics or values not on purist ideological grounds.

I also think that anarchism doesn't demand a strict adherence to a materialist or egoistic epistemology.

Finally, I think that "moralism" can be a way to shut down discourse - from both sides of a conversation. Morality, especially philosophy of morality is a complex thing. Anarchists can believe a wide variety of things regarding morality, and I don't feel compelled to attack an anarchist who subscribes to utilitarianism for example unless they use their utilitarianism as a means of control. I can certainly appreciate these sorts of criticisms of morality as a means of control, but I don't care for reductive analyses that reduce phenomena as simple or decided.

I agree. I consider myself a Christian anarchist, but not in the Tolstoyan/pacifist sense, because I arrived at anarchism simply through the golden rule. That being said, I personally think pacifism can be a form of neglect in certain situations, and therefore, incompatible with the golden rule.

Automation and robotics replacing people for doing hard labor or mundane tasks is a good thing.

I've gotten nasty comments about that one.

Edit: also supporting cryptocurrency. I'm not an ancap, far from it, but to me it's a step toward financial liberation from central bank and corporate manipulation of wealth. Then, when we have control, we can abolish it.

I'm ambivalent about forms of market socialism such as mutualism. On one hand, voluntary exchange of commodities is not unethical or hierarchical. On the other, markets are biased in favor of work that is remunerated in the market, which does not include all useful work.

Markets have a lot of problems, quite apart from the totalitarian nature of ownership and management. I think they're useful, like a hammer is useful, and no one really knows how to eliminate them at a large enough scale, with the level of division of labor that now seems inevitable in the "developed" world, the supply chains, the large-scale industrial processes. It's not like it's an insurmountable problem, but I think it's highly unlikely that it can be solved by designing some perfect system and taking one huge leap. People just need to stop fetishizing "the free market"(tm), which has never been able to function without a high degree of deliberate planning outside the market system, and treat markets like a somewhat problematic but useful algorithm for decentralized planning driven by patterns of consumption. I think markets need to be pushed to the margins, but they have their place until (or unless) they become unnecessary.

Drug addiction is not a choice like choosing what clothes to wear today. I've been addicted to benzodiazepines for years, I don't have to worry about being arrested for being gay in my country unlike people addicted to drugs. I know benzos are hardly the worst drugs and wouldn't ever claim I'm being oppressed because I can't go down the supermarket to buy some valium but you should look into the institutional racism about how certain drug laws came about (weed, khat) and the rate of arrests for black people who have no higher incident of drug use than whites.

(as a freedom, drug use is trivial, and doesn't provide any meaningful progress towards an Anarchist society)

Using psychedelic drugs radicalised my friends, and helped turn them against the state and capitalism (with a little help from their anarchist friend).

But more personally, I need to use certain psychedelic drugs at regular intervals to maintain my mental health. Sorry that my freedom is so trivial to you, but it's important to me. I suppose I deserve to go to prison then?

I thought anarchism was about championing freedom, not trivialising it.

Furthermore, what the hell is 'drug use'. That's like saying 'chemical use'. Drugs are an intensely heterogenous group of chemicals, from Heroin, to caffeine, to LSD. They have little in common and can't be all addressed in one breath.

I think that drug prohibition is most certainly oppression in the full sense of the word. It is mind control by the state.

It's also one of the biggest excuses for state, and particularly police, power.

Classical anarchism often ignores the myriad forms of domination outside of just the state and capital, and employs a strategy that traps anarchism in a binary relation between itself and the state, creating a mutual codependency between the two, leaving anarchism unable to existentially threaten true hegemonic domination.

Reveling in the history of the left and anarchism creates a linear narrative that downplays the importance of the contingency of the spatial and the moment.

The libertarian left should try to critique its own ideology in order to discover the real reason why it has largely failed to achieve any of its goals (blaming the "power" of the state is an easy way to externalize the failures)

This is where I completely agree with Chomsky(who I'm well aware is a divisive figure here). Your theories and rhetoric should be comprehensive enough that you can convey them to a 12 year old, otherwise it's just posturing, politics is not exactly theoretical physics.

And to me one of the greatest and most appealing things about anarchism is that it really would make perfect sense to a 12 year old. I know if someone had explained it to me at that age (in plain and simple language) I would have loved it.

I was at a school last year, and saw a 13 year old boy with the anarchist 'A' drawn on his hand. I asked him what it was and he said 'it's the anarchist A.' Someone asked why he'd done that and he said 'I hate the Queen, she's stupid.'

Yeah I'm in my 30's and after becoming disabled, starting to organize again. I am educated, and was even a couple of credits away from a philosophy minor, but I can't tell what the fuck young anarchists are talking about. I think we believe in the same things but I have to do research to find out.

If we keep spending all this time talking about our history, we won't put enough importance on being able to adapt to unseen future circumstances. Too much focus on the past means too little focus on the future.

Those seem like rather popular opinions, built up around a recent, relatively linear, and unfortunately inadequate narrative of "classical anarchism," which just ignores all the various ways in which the "classicals" extended their critique beyond the state and capital, not to mention their disagreements about the details of those questions.

It's arguably even more unpopular at the moment to challenge that notion of a simple "classical anarchism" and suggest that before we do too much critique, we need to do quite a bit more exploring and understanding.

Maybe natural isn't the best word, but masculine attributes in general that aren't oppresive in themselves. Like taking care of their bodies working out and shit, engaging in consensual competitions like sports (the horror!), even expressing their sexual desires for people, it isn't always objectifying.

Yeah, you can definitely have traits identified with masculinity without buying into the whole package. I'm a skinny, somewhat androgynous gay dude who finds traditional masculinity completely unappealing but I had a total blast taking Muay Thai classes a couple years back and I got along great with all the buff guys in the class. There were men, women, children, teenagers, all having a great time (safely) beating each other up.

Yeah, exactly. The problem is the gender-based generalization that we are bombarded with, not people doing things they enjoy. It is such a fallacious and self-fulfilling concept to immediately build up an expectation about how a certain person is, based on a criteria that includes half of the entire population.

-I think we should fight as armies, just like the EZLN, black army, catalan anarchists, and black panthers did; in uniforms, with guns, and heavy mobilization. Not wearing all black and covering our faces and running away as soon as police come after us. That is cowardly.

-I cringe when I see videos of anarchists when all they ever do is act out of line, scream, curse, etc. I think we should act like adults, that's how we get support. Not saying 'fuck' every couple of words and repeating the same old material again and again.

-I wish we as anarchists should return to our roots. That means, IWW members, militant activists, and direct action for everything. No internet fighting and "oh, look what these guys did in this country! I wish we could do that here!". If you really wanted it that badly, you'd round up some people and do it too.

One fights in battlezones against oppressive government agencies for hours on end, facing death at all turns, and one throws a bottle, then gets beaten down by police and doesn't hit back during or afterwords

You are confusing aesthetics for tactics. Fighting at protests is a weird dance where the use of force on each side is constrained by the other. Bringing guns to a protest would allow the cops/national guard to bring out the live ammo.

How many anarchists do you know who even own a firearm? Do we have a jungle to retreat to after striking? There have been armed left wing groups in recent US history, and they were not especially successful on the armed struggle front.

I think we should fight as armies, just like the EZLN, black army, catalan anarchists, and black panthers did; in uniforms, with guns, and heavy mobilization. Not wearing all black and covering our faces and running away as soon as police come after us. That is cowardly.

Why not just have guidelines instead, like "make sure it's good camouflage, durable, compatible with tactical equipment, and comfortable in inclement weather." Let people do whatever works within those guidelines and then give everyone a black and red scarf or something, CNT-style.

So your argument to the working class will be to escape from the horrors of the drudgery of wage labor in favor of becoming completely alienated from society and dying in an armed struggle against a numerically and technologically superior enemy?

The black bloc tactic has changed over the years. Originally it was about gathering in numbers anonymously, achieving a goal by force (usually property destruction), then disappearing. As police engaged with the black bloc more and more, the black bloc became distracted and started fighting the police.

Like you said, we need to get back to our roots. We need to stop fighting the riot cops and out maneuver them.

I think anarchists living in first world countries, where a wide array of products is readily available and still pay for meat (or give people money to kill animals in any other way) are hypocrites. Cutting meat out of one's diet is really fucking easy and the treatment that sentient beings are put through during the 'production-process' is very much antithetical to the liberatory thought that builds the basis of anarchism, in my opinion. If you're not even willing to think through your own consumer habits in order to reduce suffering it's going to become really difficult to build a better society. Not to speak of enviromental aspects blah blah blah...

Also i think the differences between communists and anarchists are vastly exaggerated nowadays (excluding the outright stalinists and authoritarians of course, if they can be called communists at all). The radical left is marginally small anyway and i think both communists and anarchists should try to cooperate in order to open a discourse on alternatives to capitalism to the broader public.

Once capitalism's end nears we'll still have enough time left to bash each other's heads in, if we can't find common ground at all. /s

If you're not even willing to think through your own consumer habits in order to reduce suffering it's going to become really difficult to build a better society.

There are plenty of us meat-eaters who do. I get my meat from a local Amish butcher 10 minutes away who raises his animals sustainably. Cows eat grass and chickens can roam around in open air.

I've examined the evidence thoroughly and decided that eating responsibly-produced meat is for me. Are you willing to lump me in with the guy in the drive-thru at McDonalds and make your perfect the enemy of the good?

Of course i was generalizing pretty badly in that post. Sorry for that. I didn't mean to say that animal consumption is black and white and i know the only viable solution. You're right, it is possible to buy from sustainable sources, but i don't know what it's like in the US, because where i live those make up around 2% of the total beef production (if i'm not mistaken; it's in the single digits anyway) and is really expensive in most cases. And even happy animals have to be killed in order to be eaten, so i' prefer no one indulging in this. But in the end it's probably better to eat a steak from a sustainable 'animal-friendly' farm, than eating a veggie burger at burger king. Eventually it's all about thinking through consumption and i've met a lot of vegetarians and vegans who don't do that at all and meat-eaters who do. As a general rule though i found that a lot of people who do eat meat do so because they don't really think about the implications and/or rely on obviously false information that would be quickly dismissed if they started reflecting about their consumption.

Correct me if i'm wrong, but people like you seem to be the exception, don't they?

Where I live, in rural central Ohio, people aren't ignorant of the societal ills that come with fast food/factory farm meat production. In my small social circle (largely ranging from libertarian-leaning Conservatives to full-blown Randian Libertarians, where my left-lib/anarchist tendencies are really only hinted at in polite conversation), save for a few "big gubbernment's trying to take my big macs and sodas away!" types, most of us are either homesteaders ourselves or frequently patronize farmers markets and local butchers. Then again, most of my friends and family are fairly well-off and above-average educated, and there are thriving fast food institutions here, so they probably don't represent the majority of this area's residents.

I am sympathetic to Veganism. I know that my ability to patronize local meat producers is a privileged act and that people who live in food deserts have no such choices. I know it's probably more economically efficient, though the health evidence questionable, to feed the masses directly with grains than to feed them to animals and feed the animals to the masses. However, I don't feel that killing animals humanely, as humans have done for thousands of years, provides them with less suffering than they would have at the hands of nature, and indeed most of the animal species we raise probably wouldn't survive in the wild because of hundreds of years of domestication. Maybe that's a rationalization, but I find the fact that I can get my basic nutritional needs from local cooked animal flesh more practical and sustainable than subsidized and/or processed tofu, tempeh, tahini, hummus, and B12 supplements shipped from hundreds of miles away.

Don't let this descend into a debate; I'm just explaining my position. When confronted with evidence that they're contributing to destruction, people will do one of two things: rationalize, or change..

Libertarian Marxist theories such as Luxemburgism and Council Communism are compatible with anarchism.

We should revive the first international.

99% of the people who you see on the street have no interest in starting a revolution.

Old theories about the working class are going out of date as we move into the post-post industrial era.

Society develops in stages, and it's almost impossible to go from high capitalism to full libertarian communism overnight.

It's not about purity...you can be an anarchist who likes breaking bad, wears converse shoes and drives a car. Getting bogged down in pissing contests about who's more "pure" than who is a waste of time.

Squats and ecovillages separate anarchists from real people. At this stage in history, a person with a megaphone in a city is way more likely to change anything than somebody who lives in the Welsh countryside and grows organic carrots.

As much as we like it, weed isn't a revolutionary weapon, and all legalisation has done is create an entire industry around it. Today in Colorado, rich white men make millions selling the same thing that hundreds of thousands of young black men have gone to prison for. That's what your legalisation looks like.

Ancaps advocate a system that gives a thumbs up to corporate tyranny and fosters warlordism. So fuck them.

Fuck respecting ideologies you disagree with. Fuck anarcho capitalism, fuck "national anarchism" and fuck Leninism. We have to revive eristic. What happened to being right?

Obese people are not an oppressed group and I feel no obligation to combat "fatism"

Adult dudes dating teenage girls is super creepy, but enforcing an arbitrary age threshold on consent is absurd

Many religions (including Christianity and Islam) demand a strictly hierarchical and patriarchal social order and they should be criticized, derided, and fought

I have no respect for anarchists who aren't at least a little queer, especially cismales. Any respectable male radical in this day and age will at least wear a skirt or kiss another dude every once in a while

I think that an ecologically responsible, market socialist society would probably be much more practical and easy to achieve than a FULL COMMUNIST society

Mao wrote some pretty alright stuff and the cultural revolution was a good idea in theory

Meat is murder, animal products are slavery and abuse

I own a rifle, have military experience, and I think that disillusioned military veterans could be a powerful revolutionary force

I've messed around with pretty much every category of psychoactive substances (excluding stimulants), and opis just take the cake.

Dissociatives are pretty cool and fun most of the time, but they can put me in a weird emotional space. Not to mention the fact that it would be very hard to deal with any sort of social interaction or emergency whilst in the depths of an m/k-hole or a 4th plat.

Psychedelics are good for really grasping, viscerally, the gravity of the situation we find ourselves in. The urgency to act against environmental destruction, our dependence on the earth and each other to survive, the true brutality and violence of hierarchical social relations, etc. However, experiencing all of that urgency and misery is not a pleasant experience - I used to do a lot of different psys, but not for a few years now.

Deliriants I only messed around with a couple of times. They make me feel braindead, but it's kind of wonderful to live in a world where fairies, giant spiders, penguins, whatever, can appear around you and interact with you.

I used to smoke a lot of weed when I was a teenager, but nowadays it just makes me anxious and paranoid. Alcohol gives me a headache and more often than not causes me to withdraw from social situations rather than enjoy them. Benzos either unleash a completely selfish side of myself or make me fall asleep/black out, and have sent me to the hospital a couple of times.

A bunch of these were really cool (the age of consent one especially) and then I got to the meat one. I have Crohn's, I'm on an extremely specific medically mandated diet, and could literally die or be bedridden for the rest of my life if I attempted to be vegan. If you don't believe me, I have photos of my medical papers (obviously without the personal information displayed).

Many humans can survive sustainably without animal products. However, there are still a significant number who cannot, and when I read statements about how meat is murder, etc, I feel like I'm being treated as morally repugnant for something I have no control over. I did briefly try to be vegetarian before I was diagnosed and I only lasted a couple weeks before I had to stop.

• Heroin is pretty cool
It certainly feels good, but it is ecstasy without enlightenment which does little for the individual and the cause. I do not condemn its usage nor do I condone it; it is a cheap and quick mental escape from the dread of this life. I certainly understand its allure, and its destructive capacity as well.

I have no respect for anarchists who aren't at least a little queer, especially cismales. Any respectable male radical in this day and age will at least wear a skirt or kiss another dude every once in a while

Is it mandatory? I just find it quite an absurd view to take. I dont quite understand the motivation behind it would you mind expanding on that point.

Adult dudes dating teenage girls is super creepy, but enforcing an arbitrary age threshold on consent is absurd

I've actually been thinking about that too. I'm not entirely sure how we would determine what is the best consent age in an anarchist society.

Many religions (including Christianity and Islam) demand a strictly hierarchical and patriarchal social order and they should be criticized, derided, and fought

Even as a Christian, I'm going to have to agree with you here, mainly because a large portion of modern Christianity is a product of it becoming the state religion of ancient Rome. I model my faith more off of that of very early Christianity, which was loosely organized, non-hierarchical, and un-excluding of women. Also, Liberation theology is a great way of turning the opiate of the masses into the stimulant of the masses.

I have no respect for anarchists who aren't at least a little queer, especially cismales. Any respectable male radical in this day and age will at least wear a skirt or kiss another dude every once in a while

I kissed my friend on the cheek once while joking around, that good 'nuff?

I think that an ecologically responsible, market socialist society would probably be much more practical and easy to achieve than a FULL COMMUNIST society

Adult dudes dating teenage girls is super creepy, but enforcing an arbitrary age threshold on consent is absurd

I've actually been thinking about that too. I'm not entirely sure how we would determine what is the best consent age in an anarchist society.

I've thought about this as well. In my opinion I feel that it would require scrapping the age factor completely. Age doesn't signify anything other than how old you are. Everything such as stages in puberty and maturity are only roughly related to age. Age merely being a rough indicator for them. Therefore it would require a on case to case determined consent factor, and a list of what would be used to detemine it.

Now which factors we would need to consider or how to document, utilize, or whatever else, for them, I'm not sure of.

Looking at current systems, I feel the one for where I'm from seems reasonable, at least until something better is determined. Age of consent is set at 16. Closeness of age factors are in place. 14/15 can consent for 5 years older. 12/13 for 2 years older.

So 15 with a 20 is on the edge of being illegal, and I feel it's a bit creepy. Then again I don't really see an issue with 15 with 19, as much. So 5 years seems like a good enough factor.

Eh, I could pull off cross dressing as a teen, but was too awkward to do anything like that openly, and I really just don't have the figure for it anymore. Don't hate me.

CIS SCUM ALERT! Grab a pitchfork comrades: ---E ---E ---E

Opiates are expensive, addictive, and tend to be calming/pacifying. While some people can be functional opiate adicts, these drugs are just not conducive to rebellion. Buying them also either funds big pharma or bloody, often reactionary criminal groups. Speed is euphoric too, can be cooked up at home or bought cheaply from a handful of developing countries gray market, and makes you want to fight back, not lie down.

This is why I prefer caffeine and LSD. Opiates are literally the opiates of the masses.

I read half of his list then yours then had to go back to see what made you say WTF. I mean Heroin being pretty cool is better than "Leftist Nationalism is okay". I am comparing the two of the, disfavouring yours and in choosing heroin over leftist nationalism I'm really only replacing one kind of wishful thinking with another.

Obese people are not an oppressed group and I feel no obligation to combat "fatism"

Do you agree that it's wrong to be rude or discriminatory towards obese people?

I have no respect for anarchists who aren't at least a little queer, especially cismales. Any respectable male radical in this day and age will at least wear a skirt or kiss another dude every once in a while

What should a guy do if he is completely heterosexual though? I don't think that's something a person can change.